By Marianne Lincoln

This week is for chasing water. I am leading the Chambers Clover Creek Watershed Council on a trip to Graham. This is the far eastern edge of a watershed that takes up the center of Pierce County. This watershed has no glacier fed rivers. It does not flow from the Cascade mountains. It is fed only by rainfall, sits in a bowl created by tectonic forces, and scooped out by ancient glaciers, and runs by gravity into Puget Sound.

Looking at the map of Pierce County, the Clover/Chambers system runs in a very northwesterly direction similar to a line from the top of Mt. Rainier to Puget Sound at Chambers Bay. Groundwater in the County flows this way as well. In WRIA12, the water actually does not begin at the mountain. It is all from rainfall.

The water flows that way. The County is angled that way as well. But the real creek itself wiggles around finding the path of least resistance with a fairly shallow presence on the surface of the ground. In fact, it disappears underground several months of the year. The folks that drill wells know they will find it within 30 feet.

The odd thing about Clover Creek is that historically, settlers have tried to move it, dam it, and redirect it in many places. Its propensity to flood in the Spring was annoying to farmers. A large section in Parkland was moved away from the PLU Campus to the asphalt lined ditch along Tule Lake Road. The former bed, still on maps, is visible from Ainsworth between Washington High School and the Rainier View Christian Church. The apple trees that lined it for many years are gone as well. In Lakewood another section was under what is not the Lakewood Towne Center, redirected from entering Steilacoom Lake’s east side to entering the lake from the south end.

Derek Faust, Ph.D., of Clover Park Technical College, created a map, the link is here, of all the places he could find that the creek was altered since 1832 when the Hudson Bay Company showed up and settlers began streaming into the territory. Don Russell, a lifelong researcher, referred to this as “immigrant population drainage ditch hydro modification mania.”

There is an oral history of the Chambers Clover Creek system at the Tacoma Library as well. A link can be found here.

If you look at a topographical map of Pierce County, the movement of water makes more sense. Melting glaciers from over 10,000 years ago carved out valleys and oxbows where water pops up out of the ground when the upper aquifer (water table) is high. In this map I have marked the places we are visiting where the water breaches the surface of the ground at Hidden Valley, Pioneer Valley, Frederickson, and Stony Lake.

Near Emerald Ridge High School, there is a high point where the direction changes and water flows toward the Puyallup River Valley. The yellow circle on the map is the location of the Tacoma Sportsman’s Club. From that point, Clover Creek becomes visible above the surface much of the year. In Parkland, west of the former Brookdale Golf Course, it disappears underground in summer until it meets with Spanaway Creek coming out of Spanaway Lake.

Hydrology and water resources offer a number of very excellent areas for study and employment. Water companies exist every place there are people. Some systems are extremely complex and the people employed can make a good living. If you have teenagers wondering what they might want to do in their future, you may want to direct them to one of the volunteer groups that maintain the creeks and rivers. It might be the beneficial path for their own future.

After the “Upstream Underground Water Tour” is complete Wednesday, I will add a couple more photos.